Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/206

200 watching the Hercules Valley and planning destruction to its inhabitants. How impossible the story had sounded then! How possible it sounded now! Most alarmingly possible in the silence of this rocky solitude.

Gretchen swept a searching glance around her, and in the same moment she had to suppress an exclamation of fear. Here, indeed, was food for her terror; not two paces off there lay something black on the ground.

This was something which did not belong to the rocky solitude, which had not grown there – no product of nature. Gretchen stooped and examined it; it was a wide-brimmed felt hat – just the very hat which a bandit might be supposed to wear drawn over his brows.

For a moment she stood still, petrified with terror, unable to take her eyes off the ominous hat all at once; but, rousing herself, she reflected that every second was precious. She held her dress for fear of its rustling, and on tip-toe she prepared to leave the spot.

Before she had made two steps she got a new fright. Here was something which belonged as little to the rocky solitude as to the bandits; for what could robbers have in common with this coloured-paper lantern dangling from a branch?

A stone rolled close beside her, and in the same instant a man stepped out from behind a rock, and barred her passage. She screamed with the sudden start. Her first sensation was helpless terror; her second momentary relief; her third was terror again, but terror of a different sort, for the man confronting her was no brigand, – it was Dr Kokovics.

Not that Dr Kokovics at this moment, with his dishevelled hair, his flushed face, and his somewhat disordered toilet, might not have passed for a very fair imitation of a brigand. Even through the dusk his jovial humour was evident; the excellent dinner of which, in company with the men of science, he had this afternoon partaken, had indisputably left its mark. What could be the meaning of his presence here? Gretchen asked herself in the first moment of surprise; but in the next already she had remembered the Chinese lantern, and there came back to her recollection the vast plans of illumination for this evening which Dr Kokovics was known to entertain. Doubtless the floods of red wine which had accompanied the excellent dinner had served to render those plans more vast, and had engendered in the doctor's fertile brain the grand idea of lighting up the gorge above the Cursalon.

Gretchen had recoiled at the moment of recognition, but the doctor advanced, unchilled by his reception.

"By the club of Hercules!" he cried, "this is luck! What happiness! What sweet and unexpected happiness!" he ejaculated rapidly, shaking back his hair as he came towards her. "To what good star do I owe this meeting with the beautiful Gretchen?"

"Thank you, I am going home," said Gretchen, retreating another step, and beginning to tremble, for the excitement about his words and gestures was unmistakable.

"You look frightened," said the doctor, stopping and gazing at her; "this solitude alarms your gentle mind. But fear nothing; trust yourself to me; Kokovics is your knight. This arm will ––"

"I – I don't want to speak to you, Dr Kokovics," said Gretchen, steadying her voice. "I wish you would let me pass."

She made a step forward, but the movement aroused the doctor's